Peak Oil News

One of the hazards involved in energy analysis is placing too much emphasis on raw data, like the kind one finds in the U.S. Energy Information Agency’s weekly and monthly reports. While rawness may be a desirable attribute in certain meats and vegetables, it is less desirable in statistical information that is susceptible to errors requiring a correction at some later point. It is even more exasperating when the changes are significant enough to warrant junking a hypothesis that explained the earlier results well but doesn’t fit at all with the newly redrawn picture. The latest example of this recurring pattern occurred this week when EIA released a compilation of supply and consumption data from January through June this year. In that statistical summary, EIA reported that demand for gasoline inched up by 0.6 percent from the year-earlier period. But in the weekly reports, EIA’s estimates of increased demand had been ...

Peak Oil is the theory, on the verge of becoming conventional wisdom, that the world's petroleum supply is topping out and will not be able to meet global demand soaring along with the economies of China and India. But a successful test in a mammoth field deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, announced on Sept. 5 by Chevron (CVX), Devon Energy (DVN), and Norway's Statoil (STO), should help put that scary scenario on hold for decades. One huge oil reserve, even if it could rival the 1968 discovery of Prudhoe Bay and increase U.S. reserves by up to 50%, will not turn around the world's tight energy markets, of course. It won't even bring the U.S. close to energy independence when oil and gas get into full-fledged production four or five years from now. » Source: BusinessWeek But the capability to find and ...

The need for such a protocol is becoming increasingly plain. Petroleum is a non-renewable, polluting, and depleting resource on which the world has become dangerously dependent. This in itself should be cause for nations to find ways to reduce their consumption and thus their dependency. However, there is also the problem of uncertain future supply. Long before the last drop of petroleum has been recovered from any given reservoir the possible rate of extraction tends to peak and then fall off for purely physical, geological reasons. Today, most oil-producing countries have already reached and passed their national production peaks and are in steady decline. There is universal agreement that the world as a whole will reach its peak rate of production at some point in the next few decades-but there is controversy as to when, exactly, the peak will come. While some analysts forecast the maximum flow rate as occurring later ...

In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush declared that the U.S. is a nation “addicted to oil” and vowed to take steps to reduce Middle Eastern imports by 75 percent by 2025. After a summer of $3-plus gasoline, most of us would see this as a good idea. But it may be too late. According to a growing cadre of petroleum geologists, the days of cheap oil are over. At issue is a concept called Hubbert's Peak, named for former oil-company geologist M. King Hubbert. In 1956, Hubbert made a bold prediction. Oil production in the Lower 48 states, he said, would peak in the early 1970s and decline forever after. He proved, if anything, slightly too optimistic: the actual peak occurred in 1970. » Source: SignOnSanDiego.com More recently, Kenneth Deffeyes, a retired geophysics ...

You can tune out all the scare talk about Peak Oil for a while—probably a long while. Peak Oil is the theory, on the verge of becoming conventional wisdom, that the world's petroleum supply is topping out and will not be able to meet global demand soaring along with the economies of China and India. But a successful test in a mammoth field deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, announced on Sept. 5 by Chevron (CVX), Devon Energy (DVN), and Norway's Statoil (STO), should help put that scary scenario on hold for decades. One huge oil reserve, even if it could rival the 1968 discovery of Prudhoe Bay and increase U.S. reserves by up to 50%, will not turn around the world's tight energy markets, of course. It won't even bring the U.S. close to energy independence when oil and gas get into full-fledged production four or five years from now. But ...

Norway's oil output is peaking at around 3 million barrels per day and will stay at this level for the next four to five years before the country switches focus to natural gas production, a senior government official said today. "We are sort of on the peak of oil production (and) we will stay here for four or five years and then switch to gas," Reuters quoted Anders Bjarne Moe, director general of the Oil & Energy Ministry, as saying at an oil and offshore conference. The looming shift to more gas as recoverable oil supplies on the Norwegian continental shelf dwindle will curb the flow of cash into the country's oil fund, which manages assets worth nearly $250 billion or roughly Norway's annual gross domestic product. » Source: Upstreamonline Moe said Norway enjoyed the status of a safe energy supplier, noting the UK's strong ...

China, the world's second-largest oil consumer, hopes dialogue and conciliatory policies will blunt tensions caused by its growing energy needs, a Foreign Ministry official said on Wednesday. Liu Jianchao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's chief spokesman, said China's growing appetite for natural resources would not put it in conflict with other countries, and that it was actively pursuing alternatives to imported oil. "At the moment we are trying to rely on ourselves for energy supply and at the same time trying to find clean, alternative energy resources," Liu said at the Reuters China Century Summit. » Source: Reuters China gets more than 40 percent of its oil from abroad and most of that oil arrives by sea. But Liu said that while China was concerned about the guaranteed supply of crude, its needs would not put it in conflict with other countries. "We are ready to work with the United States, with the European ...

The logistic curve, and its derivative the hubbert's curve, has been widely used to model population growth. And it has been applied to model oil production by M. King Hubbert. The model comes from the following differential equation: dQ/dt=kQ(1-Q/URR) where Q(t) is a function of time (measured in years) and it is defined as the cumulative production of a region until the end of year t. The parameter URR is the "Ultimately Recoverable Resources" or the maximum cumulative production that can be reached. K is the Malthusian parameter or the maximum cumulative production growth. » Source: GraphOilogy The value dQ/dt for a specific year's, can be approximated by (Q(s)-Q(s-1))/(s-(s-1))= Q(s)-Q(s-1) which is the production of year's, so let us define P(t)=Q(t)-Q(t-1). Let us assume that we have a region where the oil production follows strictly the logistic model, and ...

Japan needs friends who are rich in natural resources, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made no bones about what he wanted from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan when he became the first Japanese premier to visit the two countries last month. The country is hardly alone, however, in looking to parts of the former Soviet Union to meet its energy needs from new sources, and indeed, rivalry among East Asian nations may well intensify as they compete to woo the region. Only days after Koizumi left the region last week, China National Petroleum Corp., China`s largest oil producer, said that together with Korea National Oil Corp., Malaysia`s Petronas, Lukoil of Russia, and local group Uzbekneftegaz, it had obtained a 20-percent stake in a joint oil and gas exploration project in Uzbekistan`s Aral Sea extending about 10,000 square kilometers that potentially has 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. » Source: M&C News Each ...

There has been a lot of talk recently about the "spike" in oil prices. Spike is, of course, a reassuring word: it implies there's a downward slope on the other side. Just the other day, editorial writers and business-page commentators were reassuring us that oil at $75 (about R540) a barrel was "unsustainable", and that prices would fall as supply and demand even out. But opinion is moving towards the Goldman Sachs 2005 forecast of a "super-spike", in which prices could go as high as $105 (R750). » Source: motoring.co.za At present, we are told, demand is increasing while supply is insufficient as a result of oil companies' under-investment during the 1990s, when oil prices were low. But now (says the business correspondent of The Guardian), "the majors are looking for - and finding - oil like never before". And ...